George Frederic Watts

Self-Portrait

1864

Image released under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)

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Not on display

Artist: George Frederic Watts 1817–1904
Medium: Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions: Support: 648 × 521 mm
frame: 990 × 863 × 90 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Bequeathed by Sir William Bowman Bt 1898
Reference: N01561

Display caption

This is one of a number of half-length self-portraits by G F Watts, who was one of the greatest portrait painters of the Victorian era. In this picture he assumes the attitude of the bohemian artist, wearing a dark slouch hat and black velvet coat. This style of dress reflects Watts’s life with his friends, the Prinseps, at Little Holland House in Kensington where he lived from 1850 until 1875.
Watts later wrote ‘I paint myself constantly, that is to say whenever I want to make an experiment in method or colour and I am not in the humour to make a design’.

Gallery label, August 2004

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